SOPA, PIPA, and the MPAA

I’ve been reading some of the latest comments from Chris Dodd. I find it both amusing and saddening at how despite a resounding (but momentary) loss, he still doesn’t get the underlying ideas here. He’s blaming the current failure of SOPA/PIPA on things like “slow pacing” and the fact that this gave “the Internet and free speech advocates time to wake up and mobilize”.

Nowhere does he seem to realize that we are all against it because it is actually bad law.

See, Mr. Dodd, I think what you’re missing here is that you’re dealing with the Internet. It’s not “Silicon Valley” that is against you, it is everybody in the whole world that is intelligent enough to think for themselves and vocal enough to communicate with like-minded others.

I’m not against SOPA/PIPA because Google said so, or because Wikipedia was offline. I’m against SOPA/PIPA because I actually read the text of the damn things and I think they are bad law.

Like many, many other people who spend the majority of their lives online, I’m a pretty smart guy. I can read and write computer code. I also know English. Most of the time, I even know how to spell. And before I formulated my opinion on SOPA and PIPA, I went to the ‘net, found the text of the bills in question and read them. Then I weighed their texts against what I know about the internet (which just so happens to be a lot). It’s that simple, really.

Mr. Dodd, can you say that you have actually read and thought about these bills in great detail? Do you actually know how the internet works, and can you understand the effects that the language in these bills, if passed into law, would actually have? Because from your remarks, it seems to me that you don’t have the first clue what it is that you’re talking about and who it is that you’re dealing with.

See, you’re not dealing with Senators and Congressmen who pass bills having never read the text of them or even had them summarized to them by an intern. Instead, you’re dealing with the many, many intelligent thinking people who frequent the internet. People who understand language, and code, and law. People who have dealt with legalese in the form of licenses, and contracts, and EULAs. No, I Am Not A Lawyer, but I’ve read enough legal documents to know what the words mean and how they will be used regardless of their original intent. I’ve seen the myriad abuses of the DMCA.

Sir, we of the internet have been through legal hell and back, and frankly, we’re not willing to take it anymore.

More to the point, it seems to me that you haven’t actually considered how to solve the problem that you’re claiming to want to solve. Namely, you want to solve piracy.

Here’s the problem: Nothing in SOPA or PIPA or any other legal document you try to create will ever solve piracy. Can’t be done. The law does not prevent crime, it only punishes it. You’re unable to punish pirates, so you’re creating laws that are attempting to punish non-pirates, which just makes no sense.

Good news though! There is actually a way to stop widespread piracy of content: Convince the content creators to actually try to sell their product in sane ways. Look at what happened to the music industry, or the gaming industry.

In 1996 or so, the MP3 format emerged onto the fledgling internet. The encoders back then were kinda crap, and we were still in the floppy disk era to some degree, but the fact that 1 minute of CD quality music could fit into 1 megabyte changed the game. Suddenly it became feasible to put your CD’s onto computer-based media and use them for playing tunes. Sharing songs became much more accessible. A few years later, Napster emerged and changed the whole game. Sharing took off so rapidly that the music creators couldn’t adjust fast enough, and tried all sorts of ridiculous methods to try to convince people that sharing music was stealing. None of this worked.

What did work was the iTunes music store. Selling music online was kinda crap up until this point, because although it was there, it didn’t work properly and there was incompatibilities and the price was too high, etc. Apple did indeed change all that, although it took them a few iterations to sort out all the problems. Music piracy is still rampant, but only among a very small set of people. The iTunes music store fairly dominates music sales, by a huge margin.

Back in the day, I used to pirate video games. Hey, I was in college and couldn’t afford them. Later when I could afford them, I did buy a few, but copy-protection mechanisms often forced me to pirate them anyway just to play what I had purchased. What solved this problem for me was Steam, created by Valve software. With Steam, compatibility issues are mostly a thing of the past. I can buy the games I want without getting off the couch, and have them on the computer a short while later. No discs, no trips to the store, no fuss. I could have pirated Skyrim, instead I paid the $60 because it was worth that much simply to not have to spend my time trying to pirate it and dealing with the hassle.

That’s the key to solving piracy of content. Allow people to buy the content in a way that solves their problems. If I download a movie or TV show from a pirate site, then that’s likely only because the only other way to get it creates some kind of burden on me.

Some people in Europe have no legitimate way to watch TV shows from the United States. As in there are no actual legal means to do so whatsoever. It’s not for sale on DVD, it’s not online for streaming, it’s not broadcast locally.. And yet they still want to watch this content. It’s a bit hard for the MPAA to claim a “lost sale” when it’s not even possible for them to make a sale in the first place.

There’s shows made in the UK that I watch. Some of them I downloaded, because they won’t be broadcast here for many months, though they’ve already been broadcast there. I’ve downloaded them, watched them, and deleted them. I would have paid a couple bucks to do that, had there been a way to do it. There is no such way, and asking me to wait several months is burdensome when there’s no actual reason that I can’t do it right now.

Content creators do have the right to control distribution of their creations, but honestly, I think that they do not have the right to prevent such distribution by all possible methods. Intellectual property only exists because we the people agree that it exists. We agreed upon this specifically in order to foster the creation and spread of new ideas and new culture. When you prevent that spread, then you have violated this agreement, and the people will disregard that which you consider to be your “property”.

This is simply a fact, you’re welcome to disagree with it, but your disagreement with it won’t make it any less true.

Yes, there are those who pirate because it’s free, but if you’ve ever tried to pirate content, then you’d know that “free” applies to cost only. It doesn’t apply to time, or ease, or anything else. Pirates make things complex, specifically to get around your laws and restrictions. Pirating content is hard, and it’s something that 95% will resort to only when they have no other choice. The content creators of the world are forcing pirates into existence by simply restricting the means by which one can not-pirate.

If you want to stop piracy, you have to work within the bounds of reality as it actually is, and not within what you think it should be. Reality will not change for you, nor for anybody else, Mr. Dodd. We will continue to oppose all efforts by you and those who agree with you, but we will oppose them on our own terms, and because we all individually have thought through your rhetoric, and because we individually disagree with it.

Yes, I do want it right now. However, this isn’t a spoiled child’s attitude, this is the attitude of a technically minded, rational, and intelligent person who is fully capable of recognizing bullshit when it’s presented to him.

The modern day attitude of content distributors is bullshit, and if they continue to behave in the manner in which they have been behaving, then yes, copyright will crumble to the ground. We’ll have to rebuild it from scratch. This will not be the fault of the “pirates”.

Also, yes, I have absolutely no respect for people who withhold intellectual property from being shared and spread with others. Note that I say this as somebody who creates works and releases them for free all the time. Most of the software I’ve written is available for free, to all.

I’ve seen “reviews” on Amazon.com from people blacklisting a book because it didn’t come out in the Kindle version first. They blame greedy publishers and authors.

While this might be true for some mega blockbusters, small publishers are greatly hurt by this downward pressure on prices.

I heard Ken Auletta talking about an interview with one of the top Google guys (Brin, I think). Brin was dismissive….”Why do you want to kill trees to publish your book. Why don’t you post it on the Internet for free?”

Auletta was shocked that Mr. Google was unaware of the work that goes into such work — the research, the copyediting, proofing, etc. Or that the author should want to be paid for it.

But I wasn’t surprised at Mr. Google’s response. He seems like another empathy-less geek-titan who thinks everything should be for him all the time. It’s fine for Google to be the parasite on everyone else’s content, in other words, and to leech money from it. But for the people who created it to demand their fair share?

This is why these people have trouble in their relationships. Because they are narcissists.

Not saying this is the case with you. But my point is to show why I don’t trust these Silicon Valley whiz kids to play fair and with reciprocity.

I doubt Brin actually said that. What he probably said was more along the lines of “Why don’t you publish it on the internet for free?” And in that context, the “free” meant “not having for you to share your profits with some publishing company that prints books in dead-tree form”.

Note: I’m not conflating anything. Regardless of the medium, a creative work is a creative work. If you don’t consider software development as creative as writing a book or composing music, then we really have nothing to discuss. The nature of the creative work is irrelevant.

However, what is rapidly becoming irrelevant is middle-men. The MPAA is irrelevant. The RIAA is especially irrelevant. Publishers are irrelevant. Distribution companies are becoming irrelevant. Laws like these are not protecting the works of creative people, they are protecting the middle-men that act as an interface between creative people and their audience.

Quick math question: If you make a work of some kind, and sell it for $10 to 10,000 people, do you make $100,000? Not if you use a publisher, you don’t. You forgot the 30% fees to the publishing house, the 20% fee for printing the thing, the 20% cut for advertising, the 10% cut for artwork and editing by the publisher, and 10% cut to the teamsters union for delivering the dead-trees to bookstores, most of which never got sold and were destroyed by the store (or so you think). Your cut is that remaining 10%, leaving you with $10,000.

On the other hand, if you sell the same work for $10 over the internet to 1,000 people, you make the same $10,000, no? And there’s still 9,000 more people that might be interested in buying it.

I don’t buy music from stores anymore. I buy it directly from the bands that make it. Whether that be via their website or via iTunes (you can self-publish through the iTunes Music Store) or via whatever mechanism, the RIAA has not gotten one thin dime of mine in the last 10 years. And they never will again. Very soon, I hope to add the MPAA to that list, and any other publishing company that gets between me and the people who’s creative work I’m consuming.

The old logic of self-publishing-is-for-people-with-bad-work simply isn’t true anymore. Self-publishing is now the norm. As it should be. Why should I read your content through the filters of your publishing house, countless idiotic editors, and still have only a fraction of the money I’m paying for that go to you, the author? Remove the middle-men. Remove the filters. And don’t make laws designed to protect those unnecessary people. Yes, they’ll be out of jobs. Maybe they can change to doing something productive in society instead.

Sorry to spoil your theory there, but I am a publisher. I started a publishing company to publish my work. People in my position don’t like the term “self-publish” because it implies we couldn’t get a publisher and resorted to a modern-day vanity press. I chose this option because I wanted control over my work, including its production values and access.

And I do resent the monoliths such as Amazon, Google, and Apple telling me how I can and can’t sell my books.

Since my book was published, in 2008, I made it available as a PDF download, knowing full well the risk but wanting it to be available to people in foreign countries with no access to other outlets. I set the price.

With the Google, etc. they control everything. And the contracts they are demanding of publishers are increasingly outrageous.

Google is the worst, with their “Google Books” being little more than theft. They say they restrict the online content of each book to 30% or something with non-contiguous chapters/pages but when I checked, there were the first three chapters of my book, almost intact. Given that mine is a 369-page book, that was quite a freebie.

No, I’m just not going to let these empathy-less idiot savants in Silicon Valley tell me what I can do with work that took me 10 years of hard effort to produce. I have the right to do with my content what I want, and their sticky little digits need to start producing content instead of being parasitic vampires of the real content producers.

If someone wants my book, they are going to deal with my terms — not what some creep tells me are my terms.

And the “big” publishers — what is left of them — have that right, too. And I hope they keep it. No system works without checks and balances. And once the system allows no payment for professionals, we will have what we must wade through on the Internet — lots of unsubstantiated, self-interested dreck.

BTW, while I am admittedly not happy about the idea of “intellectual property” to begin with, at least I don’t believe that laws should be bought by campaign contributions like one Mr. Chris Dodd does.

Who said anything about “free”? It’s perfectly acceptable to charge for your creative work. However, it is unacceptable to refuse to sell that creative work at any price.

The thing about ideas and creative work is that they are not really owned by anybody. Ownership of ideas is a relatively new concept which has only come about in the last couple hundred years or so. “Copyright” itself is a new concept, and not an inherent one to the human race.

You have no inherent rights to that which you create except those that we as a society agree that you have. We’ve agreed in the concept of copyright for the express purpose to promote the creation and distribution of new works. If you prevent distribution, then you’re not adhering to the agreement anymore, and should not be surprised when the other side fails to hold up their end as well.

There is no copyright on ideas. The copyright is on the presentation of those ideas.

I don’t know where this idea comes from among young people now that everything is yours.

If I want to write symphonies or miles of code, the result is mine, not yours. I don’t care what the “societal agreement” is.

But all that seems beside the point. I’m not an expert on all the implications of this law. But I can tell you….if Google, etc. are for it, I have good reason to be skeptical. The narcissism and selfishness in Silicon Valley knows no bounds. I know. I live smack in the middle of it. It is a scary place, for that reason.

If I want to write symphonies or miles of code, the result is mine, not yours. I don’t care what the “societal agreement” is.

History proves you wrong. The very idea of “intellectual property” is a modern one, only spanning back a few decades.

“Copyright” did not exist until around the early 1700’s or so because of the printing press being such a problem. The first copyright law to speak of was the Statute of Anne in Great Britain, and even it only gave a monopoly on copyright for 28 years after the initial creation of the work (14 year, with an optional 14-year renewal afterwards).

“Copyright” is not ownership. It is a widely recognized fact that you can not own an idea, and despite your claims to the contrary, copyright is on the idea and not on the presentation. If I took the text of your book, put it in a different typeface, and published that, then that would be a violation of copyright despite me changing the method of presentation.

In fact, your argument isn’t even new. When the copyrights from Statute of Anne started expiring in the 1730’s, the printers and authors of the day began to argue that copyright was in the common law, and therefore perpetual. Look up the “Battle of the Booksellers”. The case of Donaldson vs. Beckett pretty much settled the fact that there is no such thing as copyright in common law, and that copyright is not perpetual either.

You do not own that which you create with your mind. Nobody does. Everybody dies. Everything passes. What you own is the right, granted by society, to exercise exclusive control over the results of your labors. For a limited time. Long enough to make it beneficial to you to create that creative work in the first place, and short enough to still enrich the whole of society thereby.

Dear Otto,
In addition to your post I was wondering, HR 3261 (SOPA) and S 968 (PIPA) Internet Blacklist Bills Congress needs to hear from you, or these dangerous bills will pass they have tremendous lobbying dollars behind them, from large corporations.

This means that sites like Youtube and Google and Yahoo can be blacklisted! What is your opinion on this bill??

Anything in common among those companies? Yes, they pretty much create NOTHING. But they siphon others’ creative work.

Creative vampires.

Craigslist….the damage they’ve done to city newspapers is incalculable. Believe it or not, we do need watch dogs for our city and county governments. Yes, I know geeks often don’t care and find these issue irrelevant. But they better care or live to regret it.

P.S. I know there is are many poorly researched books from big publishing houses now. But good editors and publishing houses do serve a valuable purpose, and so do good newspapers: They give you some assurance that you don’t have to read everything in that book with a grain of salt, that you are dealing with professionals who take accuracy, plagiarism, etc. seriously. Gatekeepers serve a purpose.

I recently read an article in Harper’s ( http://harpers.org/archive/2011/09/0083576 ) about Bernard Mandeville’s progressive attitude towards piracy (even that of his own work) and his theories on how it helped the works’ creators reach a wider audience and therefore ultimately become more successful and profitable.

I mention this for two reasons. One, because some comments here indicate people think your standpoint on piracy’s causes and effects is a new idea harbored only amongst the young people. Two: I would love to share the thoughts in the Harper’s article with some friends, maybe even the people in this comment stream. To do that, however, you have to either subscribe to Harper’s or sign up for a year’s subscription at $16.97. A quick Google search, however, turns up a copy of the article, in its entirety, which can be read online.

Perhaps this is merely the twisted thought of an insatiable young person, but I truly feel that $17 is too much for a single article that I cannot share (unlike the print copy that I received because I subscribe to the magazine) with anyone. So, I am left with the option of mentioning the story, linking to the original copyright holder’s site, and leaving each person who sees this to make their own moral decision about how they will read the article.

I don’t claim this is a fundamental failure of the copyright holder to allow me my civil rights. I don’t feel entitled to something in this situation. I am, however, willing to pay about $1 for content like that article, and I’ll be a lot of my Twitter friends would be too.

Organizations like the MPAA and RIAA, who are themselves not content creators, but rather content protectors charged with preventing the theft of someone else’s creative output, have chosen to erect the Maginot Line of copyright protection and alienate their customer base with outmoded pricing models. It’s not that anyone who makes anything should have to sell it–it’s that people who are trying to sell something that someone else made are trying to do it by forcing it down our throats, rather than being competitive. If all car companies collude to make cars that got 10MPG and killed their occupants even in relatively minor crashes, the auto industry shouldn’t be surprised when people stop buying cars and riding bikes. That’s the basis of American enterprise, it’s what made this country successful, and it doesn’t work with the MPAA’s model of doing business.

Better for them to offer it at a price that people are willing to pay instead of offering at prices which they are not willing to pay. They might make more sales that way, and perhaps make it such that people didn’t have to search Google for non-legal copies of the content.

I am a Harper’s subscriber. That’s how I read the article (in the print magazine). You need to read comments in their entirety, and not be personally insulting or accuse people of crimes without any basis in fact. Based on your self-avowed advanced age, I would’ve expected a bit more maturity out of you than that.

My issue is how I can share the content that I have purchased and found interesting with my friends who don’t subscribe, once. They don’t want to subscribe to Harper’s, they want to read ONE ARTICLE. Since you don’t seem to understand this point, let me make it clear with an example you may be able to relate to:

Let’s say you’re down at the soda fountain and you want a nice raspberry fizz, but the jerk (a term, not an insult) at the soda fountain tells you he doesn’t SELL fizzes, but you can buy the machine for $5,000. Are you going to, so you can make a fizz? After all, you can probably sell the machine to the next kid in line for at least $4,995…

I want my friends to give money to Harper’s to read this article, and I don’t see why Harper’s wouldn’t want that money. And that’s the crux of this issue: no one will buy overpriced content, they will find a way to steal it or they won’t buy it at all. This is NOT a new problem, and it has nothing to do with ‘my’ generation or the Internet.

If you’d bought a subscription to Harper’s and read the article (since I can’t imagine you’d steal it for a ‘measly’ $17) you’d know that piracy in ‘your’ time and well before it existed in the form of handwritten copies, photocopies, or even entire print houses dedicated to ripping off the works of Shakespeare at discount prices. I don’t condone piracy of content, but I think that railing against it is a waste of time and money, which could be better served innovating desirable product distribution mechanisms to drive legitimate sales. Like Otto said, be the Steam or the iTunes of the world and profit from the content you have purchased and licensed from its creators.

Piracy: New or ancient? Piracy has existed as long as copyright has and if you don’t believe me think about this: Have you ever gone to the barber shop, doctor’s office, etc without seeing magazines in the waiting area for you to read, that you AREN’T paying for?? Well according to you that right there is PIRACY. They are sharing something they paid for with you that you did NOT pay for (Piracy – “the unauthorized reproduction or use of a copyrighted book, recording, television program, patented invention, trademarked product, etc.:”)

Therefore next time you go to a place of business that has these magazines make sure you only read the magazines for which you have your own legitimate subscription. Next time don’t read something you didn’t pay for, because it may prompt you to go home and get your own subscription. Next time, politely inform the business that they are pirating those magazines, and they should therefore be punished.

Why didn’t the RIAA care about dual CD/Cassette players with copy abilities? They didn’t go after Sony for making a machine that can take their copy-written CD and put it on a tape. Where was the MPAA when I invited my friends over to watch a new VHS I had purchased? They didn’t go after JVC for making a VHS player that can also record programming from the TV (such as TV shows and Movies).

One more thing: before Google, the printing press was the greatest contributing factor to stolen content in the world (since you don’t want to blame the people who create and distribute particular pieces of pirated content, but rather anything that allows that crime to be perpetrated). Should we have destroyed every press and cursed Gutenberg’s name, because printing’s ability to spread knowledge implied an ability to spread knowledge illegally?

I did read what you wrote. And my comment stands. You are deciding that the price is too high. Perhaps if you had shared a link, your friends would want to pay the $17 to have the subscription. But you decided the price was too high.

Nobody is stopping you from sharing a photocopy from your magazine hardcopy. It’s not ideal and not even legal. But it’s not as damaging to the entire enterprise of the magazine as making it all available free, to everyone, anywhere, with the click of a mouse.

I know this is a complicated issue. Yet, it is disturbing to me how many people think they have a right to someone else’s work at the price they establish. And if they don’t get it, they feel justified in stealing it.

This reflects not just a “me-first” attitude but utter ignorance about what it takes to produce such work well as the foundation of a working press.

It’s not about a price I deem suitable (well in a way it is, I won’t buy a BMW because its not a price I can afford). Instead its about being able to show others something, that was already paid for in this case, easier so that they may also pay for it. Should I be forced to buy ALL of Stephen King’s books because my friend thinks I should really read this one? Should I be forced to sign up to buy all of a band’s current works and subscribe to future works simply to listen to the one song? I feel the point here is more about having individuals works priced individually, or possibly about having legitimate ways to view works you PAID for in the mediums already offered. EG: I paid for a CD, should I not be allowed to listen to an MP3 of the songs on that CD?

With books, I no long buy print copies of books, instead I buy what I can read on my tablet and/or e-reader. Why? Because when I’m travelling carrying around enough books to keep me entertained is a lot easier when I can have 1 or 100 books at the same 1/2″ x 4″ x 7″ dimensions and same 1.4lb weight.

With music, I buy what I can directly from the people making the music. Why? Because that means more of the money I spend goes to the people I am trying to spend it on. Its not because I want to get it in a more “convenient” format (admittedly I buy a mix of CDs and digital downloads). Instead its due to the fact that if I like someone’s creative work, I want to reward them for making it as much as possible. And in a world where I can reward them directly if they decide to sell it directly why would I every choose to pay people who don’t actually make what I’m paying for?

To illustrate this point, a musical artist by the pseudonym of Tech N9ne released a CD a year or two ago (can’t remember exactly) and purposely released as a free digital download to prove that fans would still buy it. It turned out to be one of the most downloaded albums that year AND one of the most SOLD.

These comments are interesting to read, but I have to side with Otto on this issue. Also the laws were written in a way that they could have been construed in almost any manner that they would choose in the future, and who knows what the people in office in the future will be like?

I have just finished a novel and was debating on publishing it in paperback but decided against it. Kindle readers are popular but I only know one other person that owns one. Most of my friends and family do not own kindles, so the audience is limited and paying 97 dollars or more just to read my book doesn’t make much sense. But I am going to give it a shot anyway and hopefully it will be eventually read on more than just kindles.

Gina has some valid arguments but she seems to be trying to keep the clocked stopped. The world is changing rapidly and books are increasingly become objects for collectors and not avid readers. Who wants to carry a backpack full of heavy books when they can car an ereader or tablet instead?

In a way I hope my book does get pirated. It will give it more exposure and since it is the first in a series that means better hope for future sales and anticipation from a market place.